An unusually busy run for me - four plays in four days - ended last night with the opening of Arcadia, Promethean Theatre Ensemble’s production of what is said to be one of British author Tom Stoppard’s finest plays.
Running at the Greenhouse Theatre, it is certainly the best I have seen this season.
Stoppard is immensely funny, but can also be intensely challenging, as his fast-paced play of humor and ideas teases the brain while tickling the funny bone. Kudo’s to director Ted Hoerl for taking on this dauntingly complicated show, and mastering it. As with Oscar Wilde, Stoppard uses laughter to disarm our defenses, so that the ideas can move in - exactly what happens at the Greenhouse.
In this play, Stoppard is said to be making a heady investigation of determinism, science, and the relationship between the laws of nature, and love. The Royal Institution of Great Britain named Arcadia one of the best science-related works ever written, a kind of Big Bang Theory but more serious. One of the main characters in Arcadia, Thomasina (very well played by Meghann Tabor) is based on a real-life 19th Century math prodigy, Ada Lovelace (she was also poet Lord Byron’s daughter) who conceptualized applications for Charles Babbage’s binary computer prototype. Byron also figures in this play, though as an offstage character.
Stoppard is so very good with language, the show sparkles, especially in the hands of Megan DeLay who is absolutely outstanding as Lady Croom. Kudos also to Chris Woolsey in the role of Septimus Hodge.
Stoppard tests form, pushing the bounds of the stage, using your mind as an extension of the set. Overall, Arcadia is a cross between high comedy, a comedy of manners and a farce. And while its seven scenes all take place in the estate, Sidley Park, in Derbyshire, England, three are set between 1809-1812, alternating with three others set in the present.
Separate casts play each period, and by the seventh, and closing, scene, which takes place both in past and present (with everyone on stage), the audience is fully conditioned to Stoppard’s world and able to follow along. If all that sounds complicated, it’s actually easy to track, especially with the wonderful performances by this amazingly accomplished cast.
The play opens in 1809. Lady Croom’s 13-year-old daughter Thomasina, a mathematical genius, is pestering her tutor, Septimus Hodge, to explain the term “carnal embrace.” She overheard those words from the landscaper Noakes (Nicole Hand) who had seen a tryst in the garden house between the wife of resident poet, Ezra Chater, and another gentleman. We learn soon enough it was Hodge, and he takes inordinate interest in coaxing details from Thomasina while simultaneously try to distract her into finding solutions to Fermat’s Last Theorem.
While the play is much to involved to describe in full, suffice it to say that present day scenes track academic researchers studying Ezra Chater, Lord Byron, and the history of the estate grounds – serving us a send-up of contemporary academia.
A host of colorful characters are delightfully played - Michael Reyes shines as Chater, Heather Kae Smith is wonderful as Chloe, Brian Hurst is a glowering hoot as the Croom's gossipy butler Jellaby - casts from both time periods keep the laughs coming. Arcadia affirms once again “the play’s the thing,” but so is an excellent company. Arcadia is highly recommended, and runs through December 16 at the Green House Theater Center in Chicago.
